Thank you, and that is just slightly more frightening. Communist Hamster asked if the spots go down that far, and there are astronomers who think that they do. Just off the top of my head (please notice that I often tell everyone that it is just off the top of my head) this could mean a merger further down, and that merger is causing the tops of the storms to move apart. The merger would logically start further down where the storms are closer together.

I predicted July 4 just because it would be a great time for a monumental coincidence. Could the merger have started then? How would I know? The prediction about it spitting out a planet is still good if it happens within a month or so.

Think about this. The moon is 1.25 percent of the mass of the earth, approximately. It causes tides up to 12 feet high in some places. A hundredth of that mass, .00125 percent of Earth's, would raise the same tides at 25,000 miles. So, any mass within a rather broad range, passing within the Moon's orbit, could raise a tide a thousand feet high or more. Just off the top of my head again, if the earth tide is something like a tenth of the height of the water tide, maybe, just maybe, that earth tide would stop the rotation of the crust for a period of time. Such a mass could spend days trekking across cislunar space, sapping momentum from the Earth by the gravitational slingshot effect and maybe indeed causing a temporarily very eccentric rotation of the Earth, and leave it rotating on a different axis.

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Indeed it could, you are right.
But the fact that there has been no such disturbance to the Earth for at least 500 million years (as shown by the geological record and the orbit of the Moon) suggests that this is a remote possibility.

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I do not know that the geological record or the orbit of the moon show any such thing. The orbit of our moon is fairly eccentric. That eccentricity amounts to about 10 percent of its mean distance from the Earth. Its inclination varies between 28.6 and 18.3 degrees. How do we know when it acquired that eccentricity and inclination?

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I'll spout at will Mary. You'll have to adapt. If a gas ball is a planet then my farts are moons. In the Book of Genji a planet has to have a surface to qualify as a planet. Otherwise it's just dust. NEXT!

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Get an education, or accept correction when you are wrong, or piss off. Your choice. [Do you know how to choose?]

Education is a continuous and continuing process. I am not surprised to learn you think yours is complete.

Genji said:

I was not incorrect.

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Find me a single established astronomer, from the Sumerians to one of today's recent graduates, who asserts Jupiter is not a planet. You cannot.
You could not be more wrong if you were a bowlegged armadillo, claiming to be the reincarnation of Arthur Askey.

Education is a continuous and continuing process. I am not surprised to learn you think yours is complete.
Find me a single established astronomer, from the Sumerians to one of today's recent graduates, who asserts Jupiter is not a planet. You cannot.
You could not be more wrong if you were a bowlegged armadillo, claiming to be the reincarnation of Arthur Askey.

An alternative theory for Earth's moon formation is that initially the Earth-Moon system was a single cloud of hot gas (mostly Hydrogen) with two primary gravitational centers in orbit about each other. The heavier elemental admixture (iron, nickel, and everything else, in our current relative abundance for the solar system) in the hydrogen gas tended to spend more time around the larger gravitational center, preferentially enriching that region in heavier elements (mostly iron and nickel, some silicon and magnesium oxygen, etc.) Eventually the two regions became two separate spherical clouds, which formed the proto-earth and the proto-moon. Later, the Hydrogen (and Helium) was volatilized away by nearby OB stars (which have since drifted away as the large stellar nursery in which they evolved volatilized away) having high UV output, leaving behind the heavier gases on proto-earth, and no gases on proto-moon. During the initial phase of collapses of the two spherical clouds, the heavy elements would have 'rained out', forming molten inner balls, gravitationally stratified into an iron-nickel center and molten oxides mantle.

Anyway, so goes the theory, which seems preferrable to the alternative theory voiced that the moon was formed from mantle material that was ejected by an impact of a large planetary body on earth. How exactly did Earth become molten under small-rocks aggregating into larger rocks into planetismals, when such impacts do not provide enough heat to melt the rock (according to a recent Scientific American article on it)?

Under the first theory, the initial gas clouds for our solar system would have been hot due to large jets of super-hot super-nova stellar ejecta hitting cold Hydrogen clouds, setting the cloud spinning (due to an off-center impact of the ejecta), and over millions of years thoroughly mixing the heavier isotopes so that samples today are uniform in relative isotopic abundance, whether from the moon, mars, meteors or earth.

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Walter, I don't understand why the heavier elements would accumulate at the larger of the two mass concentrations. If there was enough angular momentum for the centres of mass to be in orbit around each other, why would it be lost by the heavier elements in particular? If anything I'd have thought the opposite would be true, since heavier particles would be less perturbed by the gaseous surroundings.

MetaKron said:

Wagner, it's a lot easier to get it right by dealing with physical evidence that points toward what did happen than it is to deal with theories that can't readily be tested. Physical evidence may point towards X-factors that some will simply declare to be impossible without knowing one way or the other, just because our understanding of science is still deficient and so is our math. It gets that way when they can't test the math. But they still think that they can say that a thing is impossible because they don't know how it's done. They've been like that forever, religious and scientific authority. That's why they are authorities and not innovators or discoverers. They sense this lack in theirselves, resent it, and take it out on those who are actually their superiors, but who they have made their apparent inferiors by fucking them around.

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Don't give us that nonsense MetaKron. Instead, try indulging us - your intellectual inferiors - by backing up what you claim with some evidence. And maybe some answers to my questions too.

I wonder if that one tiny white spot that is more or less to the upper right is a persistent feature. This has nothing to do with ejecting a planet. I'm just wondering. A small, intensely different area like that is of scientific interest.

We really need 24/7 high resolution images of Jupiter. Maybe a website that gathers the better images from amateurs around the world and puts them together as a set of slides that people can navigate back and forth. They could be arranged by day and then by hour and down to however many we have. With the coverage we have now an entire moon could have plunged in to make Red Jr. and we wouldn't know it.

Near-infrared image of Jupiter obtained on the night of July 14, 2006 (UT, July 13 HST) using ALTAIR, the natural/laser guide star adaptive optics system (in natural guide star mode, with field lens) on the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i.